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Welcome to the business of certainty. When you need to understand the companies in your ecosystem, you’ll benefit from a certain approach. We capture and treat private company information for better decision making and increased efficiency.

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Product update: Using Orbis to assess environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk

Content team

With today's increasingly heightened focus on compliance issues, credit risk and supply chain concerns, it's more crucial than ever to know what potential pitfalls might lurk in your business relationships. Yet, in our hyper-connected world – where cascades of social media items, blog posts and news reports threaten to bury us under a seemingly nonstop flood of information – it's virtually impossible to devote the time or resources necessary to comb through mountains of data to find that one nugget of risk-related intelligence that you might most need to catch.
So, how do you manage to cut through all of this noise and hone in on just the exact information you need to discover whether that company you're contemplating doing business with (plus any of its often-hard-to-identify owners, including beneficial owners, or corporate associations) might be reputationally tainted?
The good news is that, in order to help you locate and reduce potential exposure to reputational risk in your business dealings, we've added access to environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk assessments, provided by RepRisk, a leading provider of business intelligence on ESG risks.

RepRisk – the world's most comprehensive ESG risk database

Orbis users can now add RepRisk's ESG risk metrics to the already substantial arsenal of company information available to you through our flagship global database of more than 200 million private companies. When pegged to verified entities in Orbis, this ESG risk information will offer greater enhanced awareness in your decision-making, due diligence and assessment processes. Additionally, we will shortly be making RepRisk's ESG risk data available to subscribers to our range of risk-related Catalysts– platforms that speed up and enhance decision-making in credit and supplier risk, compliance, and onboarding.

RepRisk employs a combination of cutting-edge technology and highly trained analysts to capture, curate and update, on a daily basis, information on any company exposed to ESG risks. RepRisk's ESG Risk Platform draws information, in 15 languages , from more than 80,000 external sources, including media, social media, government agencies, regulators, NGOs, think tanks and research firms. RepRisk rigorously analyses and sifts the data it collects by focusing on 28 core environmental, social and governance issues that can negatively impact a company's ESG risk, such as:

Environmental

Local pollution

Global pollution

Overuse and wasting of resources

Social

Human rights abuses

Forced labour

Occupational health and safety issues

Governance

Governance, bribery, extortion and money laundering

Tax evasion

Covering 34 sectors and every country in the world, RepRisk's data presents a comprehensive view of ESG reputational risk. RepRisk's blanket coverage approach to the capture and curation of ESG risk information means that there is no limit to the possible universe of companies that can be included in their risk platform. In other words, as long as a company, whether listed or non-listed, has been associated with or exposed to ESG risk, a record of this will appear in the RepRisk database.

What practical business benefits can you gain from using RepRisk's ESG data through Bureau van Dijk's platforms?

With access to RepRisk's ESG risk metrics – including its RepRisk Index (RRI), which measures risk exposure on a scale from 0 to 100, and its RepRisk Rating (RRR), which factors in country and sector conditions alongside individual risk elements, and offers scores from AAA to D – you’ll be able to complete many of your most critical tasks more quickly, efficiently and confidently. In addition, if you’d still like to dig deeper into a company’s reputational risk, you’ll have the opportunity to order an in-depth report prepared by RepRisk.

Imagine that you have just signed an agreement with a new supplier, a vital new link in your supply chain, only to find out, before the ink has even dried on the contract, that less than a year ago the beneficial owner of your new supplier had been under investigation for complicity in human rights abuses and modern slavery? You had thought that your due diligence was exhaustive; you were sure that you had caught everything you needed to know. And yet, this crucial detail, with its potential to seriously affect your company’s reputational risk, somehow fell through the cracks, leaving you in a highly vulnerable position.

It is just this exact type of situation – one that could easily be repeated with compliance matters when vetting potential clients, or with credit issues when assessing procurement partners, or in any of a whole range of business transactions that Bureau van Dijk's customers undertake every single day – that RepRisk's ESG metrics, when tagged to verified entities in Orbis, can help you to avoid.

From onboarding clients and vetting supply chain members to performing KYC checks and monitoring compliance warning signs, by assessing companies in the Bureau van Dijk universe you can rest assured that RepRisk's ESG risk assessments will enhance your power to make better-informed business decisions with a greater degree of certainty.

How Bureau van Dijk can help you

Certainty is a highly-prized commodity in business. Data might be getting bigger all the time, but this only makes extracting value from it more difficult.

In capturing and treating private company information we aim to give you more certainty –
and help you make better decisions and work
more efficiently.

Our solutions are designed to help different business challenges and streamline your workflow. Many of our customers blend our information with their own internal data to get a more complete picture of the companies in their ecosystem.